Thursday, January 6, 2011

Creating a Google Adwords Campaign: What To Avoid

Generating an effective Google Adwords campaign can easily be very challenging for the beginner and the expert, particularly if you're stepping into a new area of interest or even approaching your target audience for the very first time. Whilst you can easily invest hours checking your market and observing the activities of your competition, the real lessons are realized when you produce an ad and then aim at perfecting the same for performance. Nonetheless, such a tactic also makes it easy to commit mistakes - at a huge cost.

Perry Marshall offers numerous useful tips, strategies and advice on making an adwords campaign which gets success in his book The Definitive Guide to Google Adwords, yet a large number of people still make some mistakes when they are conducting research on keywords as well as making attempts at optimizing the campaigns.

When you would like to create an effective Google Adwords campaign - one which generates a large amount of quality visitors and in fact gets to your target market - make sure you're not committing any of these common mistakes:

1. Creating copy for an ad without keywords. Several adwords campaign managers make the mistake of using keywords only in the beginning, and not throughout the ad. You would like to make sure every ad copy you create is as focused and as rich in keywords as they possibly can, so feel free to work with a minimum of one to two keywords within the ad for a better ad campaign.

2. Redirecting your visitors to your homepage. You will get far more attention and higher rates of conversion when the web address you will use within your ad goes straight to a page within the site that has the offer or incentive rather than just the site's main page.

3. Depending on the 'broad match' function of the Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool. Google's Adwords Keyword Selector Tool's 'broad match' feature will only give you a general idea of applicable keywords and phrases within your niche market, but you also have other alternatives. Make use of the other features, such as the 'phrase match' and the 'exact match' in the tool to get a good list of keywords which you could use for your ad copy as well as your website.

4. Working with keywords that do not attract your desired market. Understanding what your audience is searching for will take you some time to really be familiar with, and you cannot always assume that people will be looking for your products or services using exactly the same search phrases that you are using in your ads. You will have to to build a listing of related and similar keywords and phrases by using the 'synonyms' feature on the Google Adwords Keyword Selector Tool to drill down search engine results as well as maximize the campaign.

5. Presenting your offer or promotion only in the ad body's copy. Always make sure you point out the biggest benefit right away in the headline of your ad's copy. You should imagine that your readers are only scanning through the headers; will that one line be enough that they are motivated to select your ad or perhaps go through the rest of the ad's copy? Though Google Adwords ads only have three or four short statements, most individuals still scan even these short copies and will simply respond if they see something truly amazing or unique - your chance to get their interest.